believe in me
*
Talking of fire while the lightning rages and crackles overhead is fitting for them. She can tell he too is a wild thing, a throwback to the ancient horses who knew only the open plains and survival. Calliope thinks that he would fit well with her and Raymond and all the other transplants from Ravos and the Riftlands.
Her eyes blink as he talks and she forgets that the tip of her horn is still resting against his crest. Behind those dark eyelids she can see the fire and wonder at the same time what the tame horses of this place would think of a raging fire that refused to be held within the boundaries of walls and kingdom lines. They would burn, she thinks, for they do not know what it's like when things consume without end or mercy.
Calliope and Eik, the horses with freedom an endless echo in their blood, know fire too well. Perhaps they wouldn't even open their eyes to witness the smoke and destruction. They would not need to watch it burn to know the sting of the heat.
He shakes and the spell is broken when she feels the tip of her horn sink gently into his flesh. Like Shrike his skin tears before her blade like silk. Calliope pulls back her weapon and replaces it with her lips.
He tastes like the desert. It's iron, sand and war that lingers on her lips as she tenderly wipes away the blood. Calliope offers an apology in her touch. He's not the sort of monster she kills (not the sort of man). Her words too are an offering, one bathed in steel and justice. “The name of god absolves nothing, forgives nothing.” Calliope is hot now, full of lightning and a fire that consumes like all the rest. It feels like her lips burn as she traces his spine and brings them to his cheek.
That touch could be a drawing of armor upon his skin, a choreography of war where she brings her touch to the hollow above his eyes. She paints him in a promise made of iron.
“Even gods must atone for their sins. Just as all men and mortals do.” Calliope doesn't say as unicorns must, doesn't need to. She is a scale just as much as she is a mortal caged in a skin that must know pain and death.
Overhead the sky brightens to a blinding white and the meadow is ablaze as if a comet has turned its deadly eye onto the world of Novus. “We could stop it from happening again. You and I.” Her touch is as bright as that comet as she lets it linger above his eyes. Perhaps her touch feels as deadly and unstoppable as that flashing, violent lightning.
Perhaps above is not the only storm has gathered slowly in the clouds before letting loose a cleansing sort of rage.
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